Written by Joe Pearson, Open Horizon Chair of the Technical Steering Committee and Edge Computing and Technology Strategist at IBM
This spring, the open-source Open Horizon project continued working with the LFX Mentorship Program. As part the LF Edge umbrella organization, Open Horizon had access to both the Mentorship Program and the COVID-related funding provided by both the Linux Foundation and Intel which paid stipends to participating mentees.
Similar to our previous experience last Fall, we had a wealth of potential applicants to choose from. Thanks in large part to being featured on the LFX Mentoring home page, our applicant pool grew from 30 last term to 43 this term. This time, the range of educational experience from candidates was even wider – from sophomores to doctoral candidates. The wealth of experience was much greater this term, and the drive and determination was incredible. Our methods of choosing the top candidates last time narrowed the pool from 30 to 12, but this time only took us from 43 to 30. After conducting interviews and matching applicant experience to our mentorship opportunities, we selected the final four candidates.
Two mentors returned for the Spring term, and we added two new mentors. Returning were:
- David Booz (Dave) – Chief Architect and one of the project founders, Dave is also Chair of the Agent Working Group and a member over the last six years. Dave understands the complete breadth and depth of the project code.
- Liang Wang (Los) – Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM), Architect, and Chair of the China Manufacturing Special Interest Group (SIG). Los is creating a community around manufacturing and Industry 4.0 use cases.
The two new mentors were:
- Bruce Potter – Chief Engineer and member of the project since inception, Bruce is Chair of the Management Hub Working Group. Bruce has also collaborated with the Secure Device Onboard (SDO) Project and serves on their Technical Steering Committee.
- Ben Courliss – Chair of the DevOps Working Group, Ben is a multi-decade veteran of open-source projects and has a wealth of knowledge and experience. Ben is also active with the LF Edge’s Shared Community Lab.
Dave and Bruce decided to collaborate and provide a challenging mentorship opportunity to the mentees by providing a linked project to work on. One mentee would collaborate with the Agent Working Group and one with the Management Hub Working Group. Together they would add the ability to support shared secrets. On the Agent side, Dave chose:
- Debabrata Mandal (Deb) – Deb is a final year student at IIT Bombay in Mumbai. Deb described his current work, saying: “I am currently working on an issue … related to fetching the logging information from the specified service using the service url. While solving this issue I am getting a more detailed idea of the working of the agent component.”
Bruce wanted to work with:
- Megha Varshney – Megha is a final year undergraduate at Indira Gandhi Delhi Technical University for Women. She is: “… currently working on [an] issue wherein I will be adding an API which would provide org specific status info.”
Los cooked up a challenge this year by adding support for the RISC-V microarchitecture to the Open Horizon project. For that effort, he selected:
- Quang Hiệp Mai (Mike) – Mike is in the second year of his master’s degree program at Soongsil University in South Korea. He said: “Since RISC-V is blooming in China, supporting RISC-V arch for the agent device would attract more users in China market. So first I will port some of the examples to RISC-V arch then I will help to port Anax to RISC-V”
And Ben wanted to work with a mentee to evaluate and choose an appropriate technology and subsequently to migrate pipelines to that choice. He wanted to work with:
- Mustafa Al-tekreeti – Mustafa is a Ph.D. educator transitioning to a career in software engineering. He explained: “I am working on developing a CI/CD pipeline for Anax, one of the Open-Horizon projects, using one of the state-of-art technologies. First, we evaluate three of the available options (Circle-CI, GitHub Actions, and Jenkins Job Builder hosted by LF Edge) and summarize their pros and cons. Then, we implement the pipeline using the chosen technology.”
We’re now three weeks into the Spring 2021 term and beginning to make plans for a potential Summer 2021 term, which would open for applicants beginning April 15th. In the meantime, we recently recorded a webinar with the graduates from our Fall 2020 term. It was a great opportunity to get everyone together on a call and discuss what we accomplished and learned and to provide helpful advice to future applicants.
